Daymare 1998 - PS4 Review

Daymare 1998 by developers Invader Studios, Slipgate Ironworks and publishers Destructive Creations, All in! Games, All in! Games Sp. z o.o.—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

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After its release back in late 2019, I was just waiting for my chance to sit down to Invader Studio’s Daymare 1998 after having read Mylène's review. Designed like a classic Resident Evil with plenty of puzzles along trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, you’ll be switching between characters and environments as you try to survive the undead hungry for your flesh.

Daymare 1998 has a lot of great ideas but after seeing what it looks like on the PC, I’m not sure the transition over to the PS4 was one of the best that could have been done. Visually the graphics felt dated, blurry and the refresh rates often made it look laggy as you saw the pixels trying to keep up as you moved down a hallway. Playing on a PS4 Pro with a QLED TV, I’m not sure what else could have been done to try to boost the visuals, but noticing all of these aspects often removed me from the horror experience making it go from something that should have been at least atmospherically scary, to simply, oh, another zombie.

My whole team, my friends, my family and my partner all know how much of a chicken shit that I am when it comes to horror. While I don’t play them often, though my girlfriend wishes I played more so she could laugh at me, more anyways, a classic Resident Evil experience is always something that I’m on the lookout for and on that note Daymare 1998 delivers. The puzzles range from being eccentric with having to type in Greek symbols into a computer to figuring out the lock combination based off of books missing from a shelf. Other times the puzzle can just be you figuring out the right temperature for a cooling unit to make it open.

Like these classic horror games, there’s also the worry about what’s around the corner, how much ammo do you have left, how healthy are you? Will you survive one more hit? Can you survive long enough to run outside from one house to another to avoid what’s in the air as zombies are on fire and you simply don’t have the time to deal with them? And it’s here within these elements that Daymare really shined as it introduced elements that are often left untouched.

Moving around compared to a normal Third Person Action Shooter takes some time to get used to because of the fact that you can walk, jog and run. Walking is slow but it helps to better aim and not get caught as you’re moving around the corner. Jogging takes no stamina but requires that you hold down the L1 button to do so which helps move around a bit faster. Running requires holding down both the L1 button as well as clicking on L3 and it’ll take up your stamina which you’ll also need to melee an enemy that gets too close to you.

Shooting is pretty easy especially when you can adjust the sensitivity. You aim, you fire. Pistols, shotguns or other semi-somethings all feel easy enough to use and your crosshairs only help you figure out if you should be pulling the trigger or not. What impressed me the most was how ammo is handled. Inside your inventory you have ammo boxes that take up slots however unlike most titles, your ammo doesn’t directly go from those boxes to your gun. You have to actually reload your mags to be used in your weapons. Shotguns by comparisons are loaded cartridge by cartridge though. Only adding to the features is that if you really don’t have time to take out an empty mag and put it away because you’re about to be eaten, you can just drop the mag from your weapon to the floor and load up the new one. Once you’re done, you just pick it back up and add it back into your inventory. Just don’t forget about it!

Now while I can get away from the issues with the graphics, where I really had some issues with Daymare was in how “dead” a zombie could really be. From most of the lore, we know that if you shoot them in the head, they are dead. Well more dead… permanently dead? Anyways. In Daymare, sometimes just one shot to a zombie’s head, chest, shoulder will drop them to the ground and they’ll be out for the count. Sometimes, they’ll come back up and try to eat you again. It’s neat as a feature as with the corpses on the ground, you never know if one of them will be getting up to get to you.

Where things DO NOT WORK, is that some zombies, depending on background coding mechanics, will take five, ten or fifteen bullets TO THE HEAD to finally die. Pistols or shotguns with those large blasts don’t matter, they just don’t die and your ammo count is basically flushed down the tube and you’re a sitting duck for the rest. I honestly re-did multiple sections repeatedly just to make sure that they didn’t take up all of the ammo that I had leaving me with nothing else later. It’s not a new issue either as it could happen in the classic Resident Evils just like it happened in the brand new remake where I had the same issues. I’m sorry, but if a zombie takes a shotgun blast right, there shouldn’t be anything left.

Overall Daymare 1998 isn’t a bad zombie title, but it isn’t a great one either. Sitting somewhere in the middle, there are both classic and newer elements that blend together nicely but when added with the visual issues and the more mechanical ones like zombies not dying, there’s a bit of work to be done in order to make this the amazing title that it should be.

 

Score: 6.25 / 10

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Daymare: 1998 - PC Review

Daymare is a classic action / horror, 3rd person shooter game where you get to experience a mutated undead infection through the eyes and actions of 3 different characters. Liev, Sam and Raven all are very diverse in their personalities, ways, background and experience, and each react very differently to the spreading of the horrid mutagen.

Coming out on the 17th of September, this title is packed with hard to kill mobs and brain teasing puzzles that are sure to keep you stimulated and on your toes.

Danger lies inside…. Hint: their faces are melted, and they will try to eat you.

The game follows a pretty simple and linear story mode; You must follow the path before you, kill some mobs, do a puzzle, watch a cutscene, have a slightly more difficult mob/boss to kill, then you’re done the chapter. The repetitive process thankfully doesn’t feel monotonous… Neither does it feel too tedious. During the gameplay, the story kept flowing nicely without being dragged down by the continuous sequence.

You start the game by playing Agent Liev, a special agent part of a task force on a mission to recover some highly valuable samples of a bio-weapon, in a lab that has, of course, been contaminated and locked up in a deadly quarantine. From the very first images you get, the game set a gritty, dark and eerie atmospheric vibe, with the ambient darkness and pouring rain. As you guide Agent Liev through the desolate laboratory, 2 things are already certain; 1st thing is that you clearly will be dealing with tons of zombies and an infection spreading far and wide, and 2nd that your current character really isn’t a such a good guy.

It is a bit a bit refreshing in a way that you usually get to play the good guy saving the world, not an arrogant asshole who seemingly takes pleasure in murdering defenseless civilians as much as the infected. Liev obviously has no remorse killing potential civilian and scientists that could cause a threat of failure, or not, to his mission, making snarky comments or feigning some form of empathy just before he blows up their brains.

Discovering dark and twisted experiments in the laboratory.

Unfortunately, from early on, I felt that the dialogue set a humoristic tone, more so than a dramatic one, being very over the top and exaggerated. The characters often made me laugh as they argued like children, or made silly remarks about the world, or other characters around them, which mostly all sounded very unnatural and forced. I get that it is a fantasy game, but nobody would naturally talk like that, stating obvious explanations, making pointless remarks, and talking to themselves in a way to hold the player’s hand, more than once, making the “tragic scenes” unfortunately hilarious.

Your second playable character only manages to make the comical dialogue even worse. Sam would probably be what the game wants us to believe to be the “average joe” reaction to the zombie infection… But he only comes off as unstable, unwise, and very much exaggerated in all his reactions. I simply couldn’t take him seriously and never truly got myself to care about his side of the story… even in all its “tragedy”.

The puzzles are classic in nature. You must analyze some nearby clues to unlock the next part of your chapter, often in form of a locked door. Some are more logical, others more reliant on pure guess or luck.

The now infamous bookcase puzzle kept me busy for quite a while. I’ll never look at books the same way ever again.

That put aside, the character models and general looks of the game are quite decent. It flows nicely, with fluid movements and little details that aim to make the world more immersive. If it wasn’t for the fences and obvious railroading keeping you on the right path to follow, you could almost get the feeling that the cities and areas that you are visiting are immersive, living, and well designed.

The hit boxes can be a bit wonky at times, especially around the shoulders and head areas of the mobs, and with some unflattering camera angles, as your bullets seem to magically teleport behind the mobs, or on unmoving props set before your character, in front of the camera view.
But, aside from that, the mutant zombies feel agile, intelligent considering their infected brains, and dangerous. They are quite fast and resilient. Quiet and deadly. More so than the usual zombies we get in games.

This beautiful face will be chasing, spitting and snarling at you.

They are also quite numerous; to a point that you simply cannot down all of them with the limited amount of ammo that your characters carry. That’s a good thing, though: That factor manages to create a sense of urgency and risk, which encourages you to keep pushing through the dangerous waves. That time sensitive feeling is only amplified by feature that I personally found great, such as real time inventory, reloading, hacking and healing. You also have the option of a slow reload, that puts the empty ammo cartridge back into your inventory or, a fast one, which drops the cartridge on the ground so you can focus on the enemies in front of you.

That urgency does get a bit stalled when you die and must go through what I found to be long loading screens, and you quickly realize that there aren’t that many checkpoints to go around all through the chapters. If you aren’t careful in your endeavors, you will be going through many, many reloading of your chapters, as you go through trial and error trying to figure out where to go, and what to do, since you don’t have enough ammo to waste it. And that gets quite frustrating after 2 or 3 times, and I had to put the game on hold a few times, because I didn’t feel like going through the painful restart of the same, previous segment I’ve done many times before.

Raven being the badass he is.

In general, I felt the game could use some improvement dialogue-wise, and with the current clumsy aiming and background cameras. That said, I also quite enjoyed the background lore, and the characters, Sam aside, felt refreshing and pretty cool. Including the mutated, acid spitting zombies.
If you are a fan of action-based horror games, I think you should give this game a try. It reminded me greatly of Resident Evil 4, both in atmosphere and gameplay-wise, and we all know the world could use more awesome zombie games. I will definitely keep playing it, in goals of finishing the storyline and I look forward to it. I give this game 8 on 10.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Invader Studios
Publisher(s):
Destructive Creations, All in! Games
Genre(s):
Action, Survival, Zombies
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Mylène

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